Vista is a great O/S regardless of the so called ‘popular’ opinion.  The security is improved greatly.  But with every new O/S there are things to learn, do or tweak.  Anyone running Vista for any length of time has run into either that weird "out of memory" error even though you have plenty of available RAM, windows that show the frame but not populate or dialogs that are unpopulated or partially populated.   Vista uses so called "Desktop" memory to deal with these visual operations and is initially set to 3k.  You can up that but I urge caution.  Here is a great article that shows you how and remember: don’t do this unless you’re comfortable with editing the registry!